R is a dialect of S language that was developed in 1976 by Rick Becker and John Chambers at the Bell Laboratories.
Rick Becker gave an excellent keynote talk “Forty Years of S” at UseR!2016 conference:
Rick Becker @ UseR!2016 where he talked about development of S language that gives explanations for many characteristics of R as we know it, including “<-” assignment operator.
1993 Bell Labs gave StatSci (later Insightful Corp.) an exclusive license to develop and sell the S language. Insightful sold its implementation of the S language under the product name S-PLUS.
You can read more about the history of S, R, and S-PLUS
In the early nineties at the University of Auckland in the Department of Statistics R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman.
They used GNU General Public License to make R open source free software.
Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman. R: A language for data analysis and graphics. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 5(3):299–314, 1996
Currently R is developed by the R Development Core Team, of which John Chambers is a member.
To start using R you need to install it! 😃
© 2019 Tatjana Kecojevic